


Necrologue

by paperiuni



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Bittersweet, Discussion of Consent Issues, Discussion of Transactional Sex, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Post-Demands of the Qun (Inquisition), Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-30 01:48:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11453448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: Every time he wrung out a revelation from a target, with kiss or a fuck that left them trembling and trusting, he knelt to the Qun once more.In the deep of a winter night, Bull and Dorian have a sleepless conversation that leads into some dark corners of Bull's work for the Ben-Hassrath. It rattles them both.





	Necrologue

**Author's Note:**

> A thousand warm thanks to Katie and Nele for looking this through for me. You are both heroes. ♥
> 
> Hello again. I break a long silence with a melancholy November story that I only managed to finish in July. (There's a gentle ending, I promise.)
> 
>  **Content Warnings** : Consent issues and using sex for persuasion are discussed. Nothing graphic happens.

On Seheron they call this the hour of the tiger. The deepest part of the night when the wicker-domed lamps barely cling to their flames and the shadows curl into the shapes of your unruly dreams.

Qunari don't dream, or so the wisdom goes. That doesn't stop either memory or imagination from sidling into the way of sleep.

Dorian tosses again, and his arm smacks into Bull's side.

"Those spell designs haunting you again?"

" _Kaffas_ , you're awake." Dorian's mumble is rueful. His hair makes a thatchy outline against the moonlit window. "Apologies."

"The things a man does to keep warm." The winter night raps its icy knuckles on the castle walls. The pile of blankets isn't just for Dorian's benefit. The musky wolf pelts might be, but they trap the heat in the bed long after the fire dies into cinders.

"I should've known from the lack of concussive snoring."

"Mm. Need some company for not sleeping?"

"That's sweet," Dorian says as Bull pulls him half-blindly close. "What shall we do then to distract ourselves? Finish the wine? Fuck?"

His tone doesn't change between the two suggestions. His head falls against Bull's shoulder.

"Did you leave any wine?" Feeling out the slope of Dorian's back, the jut of a shoulder-blade and the dips and rises of vertebrae, Bull watches a torch flicker like a witch-light beyond the window. The passing guard's steps are muffled by the snowy parapet.

"I did. Rest your suspicions."

"Maybe in a bit then."

The room reveals its shapes line by ghostly line as Bull's eye adjusts. Dorian's finger wanders along the groove that the eyepatch strap has dug across his temple. They're nearly as far from Seheron as they can be without stepping off the edges of all known maps. He'll never stand on Qunari land again. He gave that up on another rain-choked shore, on another day burned into much more recent memory.

"Bull," Dorian says in a note that blurs his name into a more intimate epithet. Bull starts back into the moment. "I wonder sometimes. In an idle sort of way."

"Not everything Krem tells you about me is true. The thing with the gurgut and the coconut is, though." Before Dorian can wind up a bout of indignity, Bull goes on, "Don't know that I've got any twin brothers, but if it turns out I do, you can invite him into bed. One time. Just for the novelty—hey!"

A badly aimed pillow bounces across his brow. "See if I ever let _you_ near my cock again. Let alone any other body parts."

"Liar," Bull says fondly, but Dorian shuffles over so his back is to Bull. His arm dangles in a bare, grey line towards the floor.

After a moment, Bull touches Dorian's tensed back. Dorian sighs, mostly into his pillow. The air is hung with the aromas of wood ash and rising dough from the kitchen below, the sleepy smell of their weary bodies.

The tiger is the great hunter of the wildwood, the shadow that stalks when all the little terrors hide in their dens. Its fangs will find the unwary as surely as dark thoughts do in the night.

"I swore to myself I wouldn't be maudlin." Moonlight catches Dorian's eye as he rolls over onto his back to stare at the ceiling.

"You wonder sometimes," Bull prompts. Maybe he did balk at Dorian's tone.

"I'm assuming this set-up of ours works for you." Dorian probably means the sex and all its piled-up additions: sharing beds and meals and books, talking with such rapt interest that they forget to fuck, looking at Dorian and finding his thoughts creeping onto faltering ledges of _there he is_ and _what did I do right?_

"Do you hear me complaining?"

"I was only curious. Are you content like this?"

Bull has a beat of genuine, entire perplexion. "Is that a trick question?"

"Please assume I'm serious for the time being."

"Ah. Sure." Bull shuts his eye. Unease moves like a razor claw along the inside of the lid. "Yeah. It works for me."

"I mean that we haven't defined things much. They've happened under their own weight." Bull can hear Dorian dragging his fingers along the headboard. "I don't think I've bedded another man since Summerday."

"Not since Satinalia?" Bull remembers Dorian in a mask pinned with peacock feathers, in green velvet and silver buckles that gleamed abandoned on the floor as they made a merry wreck of Dorian's bed. "Right. That was me, wasn't it?"

An affirmative noise, almost amused. "A remarkable night, as I recall."

"Have to think of something good for the next feast day."

"First Day is hardly about carnal diversions, but I do appreciate the thought." Dorian dwells a moment. "It... also brings me to my point."

Feeling his own weight settle into the mattress, Bull waits. Dorian exhales noisily. Snow snaps against the window in flinty gusts.

Then, "Do you—if it would be—oh, Hessarian's bloody blade, this is ridiculous. I have a simple question. Do you still wish to fuck other people on occasion?"

Bull stares. Never mind that it's a hair short of pitch dark. Never mind that the stilted way Dorian shoved the question together borders on the comical.

"I'm gonna get the wine," he says, husking, and levers himself up to sit. "Make a light?"

"That sort of answer, then." The shadows thin above Dorian, spinning away from a spell wisp that he flicks out towards Bull. It clings to his horn as he putters around the fireplace hunting for their mugs. The wine bottle is covered in fine, flaky rime; Dorian's mistake for not putting it nearer the grate. The chilly floor nearly peels the skin from the soles of Bull's feet.

The wine's red, cold. He waters it down. Dorian takes the mug, not even brushing Bull's hand, and pulls it under the blanket he wrapped around himself. "If this is a 'yes', it's a lengthy one. I can take the short version."

Talking is Dorian's main defence, other than a flesh-rotting spell to the face.

"What's going on?" Bull sits on his side of the mattress again, tucking his feet under the heaped bedding. "You've been chewing on this."

"Ah. We're doing the routine where you pull back my thorny layers to find a soft place to strike."

"We're talking about... about us. It's the dead watch and balls-freezing cold outside." Somehow these things intertwine.

Dorian pushes his untouched mug onto the nightstand, where it catches on something and spills a stain onto the already marred wood. Unnoticed by Dorian, jags of red spread along the grain.

"I'm in the habit of following my desires. I expect the men I take to bed do the same. You certainly used to."

If it's been since Summerday for Dorian, All Souls' Day might be a more accurate marker for Bull. Dorian was gone for the chief part of the summer, lending his grudging expertise in the Emprise du Lion while Inquisition scholars puzzled over the unseasonal cold and the welter of red lyrium. On the other side of the Frostbacks, Bull and the Chargers went on jobs out of Skyhold.

Bull drinks a mouthful.

Dorian says, "And there are things I cannot give you."

"You and every other person under the sun. Nobody's good with everything."

"That's a platitude."

"It's the truth." Bull's throat is sour with the wine; not a good vintage. It didn't matter earlier in the evening. "Like yours."

"You know what I mean." Dorian quickens with impatience or discomfort. "Surely you miss something. Redheads. Women. Elves. Other qunari—though the selection is quite slim there."

Dorian _has_ been chewing this over. His words blow over Bull like wind from a bellows, hot and stinging.

He picks one from the list of questions he has for those moments when a partner turns queasy. "You wanna stop?"

"I'm rambling, no?" Dorian scrunches his nose. The spell wisp dims in some arcane sympathy for his distraction. "I'm trying to allow for a... a smooth withdrawal."

"By asking if I miss tits or pointy ears or whatever so much I'd—" Bull hears his own voice going rough. His next breath feels heavier than the last one.

"A man once left me because my hair felt wrong to his fingers." A shrug, near hidden under blanket and rumpled linen shirt.

"Then he was picturing somebody else, and he wasn't worth a fart from you. Unless you're into that."

Dorian stifles a guffaw into his sleeve. Two sentiments jolt at Bull at once: elation at Dorian's laughter, and his own, leaden upset.

They look at each other across the span of the bed, the wisp limning their faces into visibility. The winter dark of the mountains is a pall upon the world, not like the muzzy umbra of the jungle. All the same, Bull's mind floats back towards Seheron. Something eats at him like alchemist's acid splashed on skin, no way to stop it but sawing off the limb.

"I like to think I'm a reasonable man," Dorian says. "Reason tells me you could fancy half the people in Skyhold for one virtue or another. It'd be wretched of me not to see that, even if my own tastes run more narrow."

Bull's fingers have clenched around the mug. He relaxes them, trying to loosen the pressure banded around his lungs. Maybe he should appreciate Dorian's attempt to make this about himself rather than Bull.

"I don't remember us making any promises." The words cut his mouth. "So if you want that to be that, then that's what it is."

When it was his choice to bed somebody, this was the first rule he set for himself: they could come to him lightly and leave without fuss. Soon he'd have to be on his way, and that left little room for anything other than a mutual good time.

"There were three 'thats' in that sentence, each more vague than the last." Dorian crosses his arms, more peevish than defensive.

"If you're looking for a way out, the door's right there." Bull frowns as soon as he's spoken. "Crap. I didn't mean it that way."

"How can it be that you can understand me from half a word in bed, but a conversation is utterly beyond us?"

Because that's what he knows: how to read, gauge and respond. How to tease out what makes a partner run hot—most often for its own sake, at times as a means to an end.

"I told you." It's harder to say than it should be. "I told you the first time we fucked. If this ever doesn't work for you anymore, you just go."

Dorian's words rip at his mind like thorns at fine fabric. _A smooth withdrawal._ As if that's what Bull wants, as if that's what he's wanted for months.

Dorian makes a guttural noise. "Yes, Bull, I know the rules. You made me learn them by heart."

This is how the rules went: Use all the tools in your kit. Sex makes the _basra_ unwary and pliable. Every now and then, he heard another delighted or scandalised rumour about his prowess spin into being. That served his ends.

Who does Dorian gossip with? Or does his own history of silence keep him quiet? That might be a first.

Dorian _is_ a first. Without precedent, without peer. Bull's never gone through the like, this maddening skein of repeat and return, the weeks of looking for him in other beds when he was away all summer.

Those other beds seem to be where Dorian thinks he belongs. Tumbling one curious soul after another. That is what he's let everyone assume—Dorian among them.

That, too, served his ends. It was a light enough charade to keep up.

"Yeah, I did. So you don't have to make excuses for yourself." Bull feels frozen in his seat on the bed's edge. It's better when they don't look deeper in.

"I know the rules. But we no longer abide by them. You know that."

Dorian's voice cracks, even though he strains for a sober tone. His face is turned the other way. Bull can almost see the shivers passing through his taut shoulders, and yet all he can think is:

Thank fuck Dorian never particularly interested the Ben-Hassrath. A Tevinter defector, a scorned noble scion, too full of hot air and too short on connections to be a substantial threat. The Qun doesn't miss much, but it always knows how to prioritise.

Bull encouraged that perception in his later letters, until the blade came down on the Storm Coast. Dorian doesn't know half of it. Bull's told no one.

Before he can find words for any of this, Dorian does. "I thought—foolishly, for sure—that I could get a straight word out of you. I might as soon milk a goat for honey!"

Fuck. "Dorian, it's not—" _About you._

Another lie. Dorian is indelibly in his head, in his bed, in his life, carved into the marrow of his uncertain new existence as a man alone.

Dorian's feet strike the floor. "Do you _know_ what this is between us? Perhaps I should find the door so you can twist into your knots in peace."

Something has warped in Bull, a joint wrenched out of socket.

Intimacy is a means. At first, he did it for the sake of the cause—the singular, absolute purpose. You are a tool. Your wit, your voice, your body, all instruments to coax and uncover. _Anaan esaam Qun._

He tastes bile under the wine. Shadows swim across the walls as Dorian beckons the spell wisp to him.

"Wait."

A boot hangs from Dorian's hand, the buckles still undone.

Bull reaches for his own boots and the brace that's creaking again—the pins need oiling. At least Dorian stops to scowl at him.

"Planning to race me to the door?"

If he only lets go, he's swallowed whole by green, chittering shadows, by thickets of flowers blooming with the tips of poisoned spears, by the smoke rising from the ruined village where he asked for water a week ago. When the mind has one explanation, it tends to pull that up as the cause of every trouble.

His breathing is shallow. He inhales, forcing his lungs to take in all the air they can.

"I've got to—I need a moment." He wasn't supposed to put this shit on Dorian. Not on anyone. "Wait an hour? It's warmer here than in your room."

"Now I'm required to wait on your pleasure?" Sharp, fast, a dagger held in a duelist's grip.

 _You're not required to do a damn thing._ That is the point. They're not watching you, are they? You just pass on information. No more killing, no more civilians caught in the middle. But results are expected, and you were taught many methods to obtain them.

He can't be here with Dorian if his head is full of the past.

"No," Bull says, "but, please."

Dorian's expression falls, puzzlement washing out his anger, and Bull feels his heart twist at the way Dorian's eyes cinch. It's gone soon, that soft glimpse, but his voice is hushed when he speaks. "One hour. I'm borrowing your glass."

 _One hour._ Bull fumbles with his boots. Another breath. Shirts of linen and wool, then the thick, fine-woven scarf Vivienne gave him to wrap on his head. He shrugs into his fur-lined coat as Dorian fetches the hourglass from the mantle and sets it to run.

Memory throngs him like hands on his skin. They leave prints, scratch with painted nails, smear the marks left by mouths moments before.

The last button slides into its eyelet, and he tugs up the collar. Dorian's dark, slanted gaze follows him out into the night.

* * *

He wanders.

Torches dot the battlements, lights for the guards shivering through their watches. The moons turn the snow into planes and slopes of milky glow, sliced by the shadows of towers and banner poles. If there's any ancient magic in the stones of the castle, it does little to blunt the cold.

A guard gives him a drink from her illicit flask of moonshine. Her conspiratorial wink sparks invitation— _who kicked you out of bed on a night like this?_ —but he smiles, shrugs it off, and moves on.

She might not have quibbled, if he'd just made her warm for a while. Even as a fixture of the tavern and the bailey, he's an exotic sight to these southerners, stone-grey and dragon-horned. Some of them like that sense of the strange. Others are drawn to his affable nature or his physical stature and strength. That probably got to Dorian first, too.

If he'd been asked, he would've exploited that fascination. Made Dorian, too, feel safe and special, or simply sated enough to loosen his tongue.

Dorian would've made it easy, starved for care as he was.

Yet it is care that Bull found _in_ him.

Leaning deep between the merlons on the battlement, Bull lets the thought eat at him. The ice-crusted stone bites into his fingers through the sheepskin mittens.

 _No one's going to ask that of you now_. Not the Inquisitor—it wouldn't occur to her. She'd blanch at the mere suggestion. The Ben-Hassrath are done with him.

The wind flurries with prickling flakes up on the parapet. He inches down the steps to the shelter of the bailey. Even the Herald's Rest lies dark, but he stands a moment inside the kitchen door to thaw his stiffening fingers. The stumps on his left hand are easily chilled.

One of the bakers presses a piping-hot chunk of barley bread into his hand, patting his arm before whisking away. They don't stay to chat this time of night, when the ovens must be filled and emptied as quickly as they can.

They like him here. He's made himself liked in many places before, though Skyhold's claimed him for longer now than any other posting since Seheron.

And he likes them: their wild, loose ways with pleasure, their chaos and caprice.

Seheron doesn't hold his answer this time. It is simply the place he thinks of first when old shadows stir in him. An easy thing to blame.

He eats the bread morsel by morsel. Gives himself time.

* * *

The hourglass is still by the time Bull opens his door again, the sand pooled in the lower half. Recently ruffled, the fire burns well, in a long bright tongue at the end of a birchwood log. He knocks the snow from his boots and hauls the door shut.

"You're late." Dorian has curled himself onto the windowsill, his side pressed to the glass, half the quilts and furs tugged around him. His breath skims along the glass in puffs of white mist.

"What the shit are you doing, sitting there in the cold?" Bull can't manage a gruff note. Dorian's still here.

"It kept me awake." Dorian's eyes are rimmed with black. "What would it have said if I'd fallen asleep in your bed now?"

What has it ever said? Did Bull ever stop to wonder about that? He unwraps his scarves, opens the coat, and leaves it hanging from his shoulders. The fire has some way to go in warming up the room.

"That you're a sensible guy who sleeps this time of night."

"I've never been a sensible man. You should know that by now." Dorian motions towards the fireplace. "There's tea."

Tea, and what else? The pot smells of apricot, so maybe a dash of brandy from Bull's shelf, but the mug glows heat into his fingers.

"I didn't really answer you." He doesn't know how to respond to Dorian's continued presence, but he should try.

"No." Dorian yanks at a blanket wound under his leg. At least he's wearing his boots. "Do you know why I asked?"

"A bit. You know why I had to go out?"

"Normally I'd surmise it was some no doubt fascinating Qunari self-discipline ritual. Perhaps you'll enlighten me."

The knotted threads mooring him to the present ravelled free. Dorian spoke in the echoed voices of others who used to be a pinnacle.

"It's twisted up." Tackle it like a problem; root out cause and effect, the method to his own confusion.

"I _am_ from Tevinter, Bull. I can handle intricacy, even at this unholy hour."

"Right. Two threads to start with." Bull bends his nose into the steam from the tea. "You were trying to tell me what I wanted."

Dorian's sigh flutters across the glass. He's withdrawn into a graven image of himself, turned into a watchful idol. The impassive look sits ill on his mercurial features; Bull's more used to making that face than having it turned on himself.

"And I—it's not really got to do with you, this part."

"Only enough to practically make you flee the room."

"Not helping," Bull says, and Dorian's mouth twitches with something like remorse. "Sometimes the Ben-Hassrath sent me a name. A lot of the time, I just went from place to place and listened to whatever I could. But then there was somebody they wanted more on. History, connections, holdings, some piece of a bigger puzzle they were putting together."

Dorian nods.

"So I'd figure out a way in. If I was lucky, I asked around, talked to the guards when they were putting their feet up, maybe worked out how to get hired."

Stray chips of mortar rattle down to the floor. Bull realises he's picking at a seam between two rows of stone in the wall, scratching with a blunted fingernail.

"There were times you weren't so lucky, I take it."

Dropping his hand, Bull fits his fingers to the edge of the windowsill. "I did whatever got me results."

"You understand that as sincerely as I loathe blood magic, it's a national sport in Tevinter. There were four assassination attempts on my father and one on my mother and me before I was twenty." Dorian musters a phantom of aristocratic posture. "I'm not squeamish. Or under any illusions as to the fact that you've killed a great number of people in creative ways."

"Death wasn't in the picture, unless the job went really wrong." If only Bull could take the opening Dorian offers in his misunderstanding. "The Ben-Hassrath had a lot of good killers, me included. But I like people. Don't have to fake it. They feel that, when it's honest. Trust you in a whole different way."

Dorian slackens from his tight position, letting his chin dip, his eyes fixed on his hands. It's a cautious unfolding, but real.

"I know. It... used to confound me."

Squeezing past a mounting swell of relief— _maybe this will work, maybe I can get him to see_ —Bull says, "It was useful. It let me get close and I didn't even have to lie. Much."

Every gentling line in Dorian's body tightens again. "What are you saying?"

No way but forward. "I'm saying that I had a couple less hurdles to clear when I fucked my way into someone's confidences."

"And—did that bring you what you needed?"

Bull lets the pressure in his throat echo in his voice. "Most of the time. Nobody's foolproof, but I am good at giving them what they want."

 _Even when I didn't want them._ The thought floods him like a stream bursting from rock it has hollowed.

"There was no need for all this preamble." Dorian's voice crumples with the same misery that he tries to scour from his face. "I should've gone when you told me to. Though perhaps it was some degree of amusing while it lasted. A fine joke to play on the stuck-up Tevinter."

No profanity in all the languages Bull can swear in could express the way his heart sinks. A panicked tug, like a snapped tightrope. He's hemmed and hawed towards the truth: that every time he wrung out a revelation from a target, with kiss or a fuck that left them trembling and trusting, he knelt to the Qun once more.

_I submit so I may serve. Give me direction. Give me purpose._

The irony is this: the pleasure of others gave him purpose. The Qun sanctioned sex as a tool, but he found other uses for it. There’s no point to his continued affair with Dorian other than mutual desire.

So, the scale is laden with his squirming memories in one cup and Dorian's stricken face in the other.

The Qun is irrefutably behind him. Day by day he believes that. Dorian shifts, sweeping the blankets from his legs.

"No final piece of wit to send me on my way? You told the Inquisitor what you were, but I didn't rate that consideration?" Dorian snaps so he wouldn't stammer. Bull knows that without further thought.

The Qun is gone, and he's left to build his own touchstones.

"I suppose I should feel proud. You must have known there was nothing I could give you, and still you came to my bed."

Take whatever hurts you most and hurl it at your opponent before he can skewer you with it. There's power in grasping your own pain, and Bull can nearly see blood well from Dorian's clenched hands, set on his raised knees.

"It wasn't like that. Shit, Dorian—it's not like you _mattered_ to—"

"To you?" Dorian braces himself, his body motionless by dint of sheer will.

"To the fucking Qun!" It's not anger that rouses his voice. "They deal in bigger things than me or you. You have a talent, they find a use for it. They don't ask. So yeah, I put a squire against the railing in the tavern rafters when his knight was carrying orders from some arl, and..."

He did what he was asked. _I can handle intricacy_ , Dorian said, but what would he say of this? That Bull carried out orders and yet tried to be as good, as attentive, as considerate as he could to those he fooled. Tried not to use them as he was used at the same time.

"And I pretended to want him," he says, the story cut in mid-breath. He remembers the young man, had pulled him up to drive home some point that was never maybe set on its target. "Not you. Had no orders on you."

The silence that falls feels deeper than the winter snows, for all that it is short-lived. Dorian's eyes widen in slow comprehension.

"What if you had—" Dorian clearly can't help asking, as if he has to reel in the whole of this tangle. "They told you to do this? The Ben-Hassrath? Many times?"

"I didn't count." Best not to. He already has a mind given to keen recollection. Those times were better buried in a spate of more pleasant encounters.

"Maker's mercy." Dorian sits back, drawing a loud breath. As quick as he can be to smooth his face into a casual countenance, he's not bothering now. His brows knit together in a hard angle, his other eye in shadow as the firelight cuts across his temple.

For once, Bull makes himself not guess at the thoughts racing beneath that face—that drawn, expressive, dear face.

Certainly Dorian projects anger, but as a cover for something far more raw. His fingers flick restlessly. "I—I had no idea. That's obscene."

 _It was deemed necessary._ Bull stands quietly as Dorian thinks. Neither of them has moved; they sit on the boundary of the fire's heat and the snowy night, and it's not the only threshold here.

Then Dorian says, "Come here."

He asks permission not in words but in how slowly he reaches for Bull, his hands curving closer. Bull allows him to touch his face, chapped thumbs on his cheeks. Climbing up onto his knees, Dorian clasps his arms around Bull’s shoulders, and he can't stop the gasp that breaks free.

"I'm rather abysmal at this. The whole comfort thing, you understand."

Bull lays a hand flat on Dorian’s back. The turn in his mood was swift, but something in Bull yearns to trust it.

"You don't think the Ben-Hassrath are planning on sending any more killers after you?" Dorian sniffs against Bull's coat. "I only ask out of a sudden desire to remove their spines through their throats. Perhaps to send some severed heads back to Par Vollen."

"Don't think Inquisition couriers can get that far north."

"You and your pragmatism. Always getting in the way of a good vengeful whim." Dorian's arms tighten around him, his palm opening against the back of Bull's head.

Bull could fold now and Dorian would have him. The knowledge rises up to him as firm as the stone roots of the castle. "Look, you just—took me by surprise."

"And now you're paying me back tenfold?"

Dorian's huff of laughter pulls an answering one from Bull, too. He nudges Dorian's nose with his own, still wind-bitten in contrast to Dorian's warmer skin. "It's old stuff by now."

"It seemed actual just a moment ago." In the dim light, Dorian's eyes are little more than dark shapes in his face. Bull shuts his one seeing eye.

"I—I didn't think much of it while I was doing it. Just another way of getting a job done."

"But you did not want it."

There is a weight to that, even one realised late. Being with Dorian—in rest, in argument, in joy, in pleasure—opens something in him that he can't readily name. It bares and shelters him in equal measure.

Using himself for the sake of the Qun was, in a sense, the reverse of that. It meant closing off that raw part of him that knew the worth of his own desire.

He wets his lips, tight and parched with cold, and lets himself pull Dorian closer. "True. Also done and over with."

"You're impossible." Dorian presses into him, the long line of his body solid as an anchor. "What shall I do with all this perfectly good concern, then?"

"That part where you were planning to murder agents on my behalf was sort of sweet." It becomes less of a joke than Bull hoped, but Dorian graces him with a hushed chuckle. They share that, too. Another step towards calm.

"I would." Dorian swallows. He's still on his knees on the stone windowsill, a hand-span taller than Bull while they stand together so.

"Yeah." They're comrades-in-arms: they fight and kill to defend each other. That isn't all that Dorian means. _I would kill them for threatening you. I would make their deaths into a declaration._ "Same to you."

As declarations go, that isn't very grand. Dorian deserves better, deserves more, but he gives a sigh against Bull's brow, and then his hands bracket Bull's face, gentle and irrefutable.

"If that is what you want, I will not worry. I'll even set aside the righteous fury—it's hardly as if I could find any ready targets for it. Though it is a marvellous look on me."

"Unlike the whole 'awake at the dead watch with frost on your eyebrows' thing." By degrees, Bull settles into Dorian's nearness, letting it realign his twisted lines. Want is a branching path, this he knows, but new forks seem to be unfolding as they speak.

"We both had things keeping us up," Dorian says. "How would you feel about sleep now?"

Here is a thing Bull wants: to return to bed with Dorian, to tangle their heavy limbs together, to breathe in drowsy unison, whether dreams find them or not.

It isn't much, but it fits. He holds it with the same care that he wraps Dorian in his arms, scooping him from the windowsill with a grumble of effort.

Dorian buries his head into Bull's shoulder as they make their way back into the bed.

Snow builds up against the glass of the window, hemming the room from the world.

* * *


End file.
